Gizmodrome is the brainchild of four musicians who have all reached the commanding heights of their
profession. It is a band who came together by a process which combined instant musical karma with a gestation period going back a decade or more. The musicianship on their first, self-titled album is off the scale. So too is the creative and philosophical commitment to their cause. But the main thing is that they’ve got a bunch of properly great songs that they urgently want you to hear.
With a collective CV that includes the Police, Level 42, King Crimson, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, Talking Heads and PFM just for starters, Gizmodrome is hardly your average new band on the block. But the spirit of adventure and camaraderie that characterises their music – a cosmopolitan blend of progressive rock and a pinch of punk with a heavy twist of avant-garde humour – is reflected in the unlikely origins of the group.
The band, like the album, was made in Italy. Stewart Copeland first met Vittorio Cosma in 2003 at The Night of the Tarantula, an annual music festival embedded in the ancient, Greco-influenced culture of Salento, in the deep south of Italy. Cosma was the festival director and Copeland one of the star attractions at this event during which, according to local legend, the women of the region are bitten by the Tarantula, causing them to dance to the music with ecstatic abandon all night long. Such was the bond forged between Copeland and the local musicians, that he was inducted by the mayor of Melpignano into the musical tribe of the region and to this day remains an honorary Salentino.